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Edge GLARE Problem

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I photographed an oil painting using a Nikon D850 and captured a RAW file. I did not use polarizing filters because I didn’t have them. The left and right sides show glare across the canvas weave on each side of the canvas. I’ve tried using the Curves adjustment on a new layer, but that only works area wide.

I may photograph the painting again, but thought I would see what Photoshop could do to improve the image.

I will put the full image and a detail of the LEFT side (the right side is the same). There are blue pixels which are perfect and the white/light pixels are blown out causing the glare effect.

Thank you for any suggestions:

I am assuming the worst case scenario here… either I get those polarizing filters and shoot again, or, I repair the image pixel by pixel by sampling a nearby correct pixel and patching the bad pixel. I can’t do a general repair, because there are very subtle shifts in color across the canvas!

Thank you for any suggestions.

D Fosse

Community Expert

You can’t fix this in Photoshop. Shoot it again.

I always use cross-polarizing for this - polarizing film on the lights (studio flash units), and a polarizer rotated 90° on the lens. That kills absolutely all surface reflections. It also increases contrast and saturation to the point where you may need to dial both down a bit.

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EonsCreative1Author

Known Participant

Thank you D. Fosse. Nice work there, thank you for sharing. Are those two shots - one with and one without the cross polarization, or, is the left the original and the right an edited final version from Photoshop?

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D Fosse

Community Expert

@EonsCreative1

That’s one with polarizers and one without, done for demonstration purposes (I’ve kept this around because it comes up from time to time).

Another thing affecting this is the distance to the lights. Moving the lights further away always helps; the problem, of course, is that often you can’t.

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CORCTON34033231

Community Expert

Hi — your worst-case instinct is basically right, and it's worth saying plainly: where the glare has blown the pixels to pure white, the canvas detail underneath is gone. No Photoshop tool can recover texture that was never recorded, so a pixel-perfect repair of the worst areas isn't possible. That's why re-shooting is the reliable fix here: for a flat artwork, a polarizing filter on the lens (ideally with polarizing gel over the lights too — cross-polarization) with the lights at about 45° will remove this kind of glare at the source.

For the file you already have, you can still improve it a lot by working locally instead of globally:

1. In Camera Raw, pull Highlights and Whites down first — this only helps where pixels are near-clipped, not fully clipped, but it's worth trying on the RAW file.

2. Add a Curves adjustment layer, pull the highlights down, then fill its mask with black and paint white only over the glare bands, so the correction stays local and the rest of the painting is untouched.

3. Select > Color Range > Highlights can give you a starting selection for the mask.

4. For small stubborn spots, the Clone Stamp at low opacity, sampling nearby good canvas, works better than any global adjustment — and it respects the subtle color shifts you mentioned.

If this is a one-off valuable painting, re-shooting with the polarizer will save you far more time than repairing pixel by pixel.

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EonsCreative1Author

Known Participant

Thank you for confirming my WCS! I spent all day yesterday being stubborn, running through Curves adjustments, clone stamping and even one attempt at setting up a global search for pixels of one color value and replacing them with pixels of another value… The Horror!

Getting filters and shooting it again.

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